NEW YORK - eTradeWire -- Cloud enables companies to garner deeper insights and better manage interactions. Enterprise is using machine learning to identify anomalies and artificial intelligence to spot negative patterns. Cloud enables companies to discover potential issues faster and resolve them before they escalate and impact the business.

In this episode of "Formula Cloud", two giants forgive and forget, Adobe and Amazon push to help grow merchants, Alibaba recruits new comrades in Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and Oracle draws in a new colleague with its expertise in Blockchain.

In our top story, two behemoths -- Sony and Microsoft -- are now officially chumming around. They announced a new partnership aimed at entertainment platforms, along with future cloud solutions in Microsoft Azure to support their respective game and content-streaming services.

In addition, the two companies will explore the use of current Microsoft Azure datacenter-based solutions for Sony's game and content-streaming services. By working together, the companies aim to deliver more enhanced entertainment experiences for their worldwide customers.

"For many years, Microsoft has been a key business partner for us, though of course the two companies have also been competing in some areas" said Kenichiro Yoshida, CEO of Sony. "Our joint development of future cloud solutions will contribute greatly to the advancement of interactive content"

"Our partnership brings the power of Azure and Azure AI to Sony to deliver new gaming and entertainment experiences for customers" added Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.

Look at the Magento stores on Amazon that provide access to an ecosystem of over 300,000 developers and over 4,600 commerce extensions. Merchant tools such as payments processing from Amazon Pay can eliminate the need for custom development and integration work, saving sellers time and money.

Now Adobe and Amazon want to accelerate growth for third-party merchants. The new offering -- part of Adobe Experience Cloud run on AWS -- is built to deliver faster page load times and better conversions, as well as the ability to scale for peak shopping periods such as Cyber Monday.

"Our work with Amazon empowers this large community of sellers to get closer to their customers while saving them time and money on development" said Jason Woosley, VP at Adobe.

"We are excited to support Magento Commerce branded stores for Amazon sellers, which builds on our long running collaboration with Adobe," said Terry Wise, VP at AWS. "Powered by AWS, this launch will provide sellers a seamless way to grow their business and scale for peak shopping periods."

You can only go so far by yourself, right? In some ways that shows up as the mantra of Alibaba Cloud. To prove that point, the company has added nine new partners to their Europe, the Middle East and Africa or EMEA Ecosystem Partner Program. Introduced last year, the program was developed to strengthen collaborations for partners working in the regions.

The goal is to facilitate the digital transformation of companies in the EMEA region, especially those in the retail sector by leveraging Alibaba Group's expertise in e-commerce, logistics and New Retail. The new partners can tap into the Alibaba's business success and market insights in order to expand their presence in China under the "China Gateway" initiative.

"We believe in leveraging our partners' strengths to create a strong ecosystem for technologies and solution offerings," said Yeming Wang, GM at Alibaba. "By offering our state-of-the-art cloud infrastructure and advanced data intelligence services, together with our partners, we hope to accelerate companies' digital transformation, and help them succeed globally in markets especially in China."

Existing EMEA partners include companies such as Linkbynet, Ecritel, Micropole, and Intel who joined the program last year.

In other news, as blockchain becomes an important data store in the enterprise, platforms have to allow users to capture blockchain transaction history and current state data for analytics as well as integrate it with other data sources.

At least that is how Oracle won over Blockchain bellwether Everledger.

Everledger's blockchain-based platform is trusted by many industries including diamonds, colored gemstones, fine wine, and art. The ability to transparently track the provenance and lifetime journey of assets as they move across global supply chains is especially critical for high value goods. These industries are more susceptible than most to theft, fraud and counterfeit – in the diamond industry alone, fraud events cost the insurance industry millions of dollars a year.

By including Oracle Blockchain Platform in its offering, Everledger can now offer its customers an improved time to market for business intelligence reporting solutions.

"With an increasing consumer consciousness and a vocal demand for transparency, our work is focused on engaging entire business ecosystems to provide consumers the ability to make fully informed purchasing decisions" said Leanne Kemp, CEO at Everledger. "It is thus key for us to enable the ease of systems interaction and provide value add to our customers."

"Formula Cloud" is produced by TVP, and sponsored by RestonLogic, cloud wizards leveraging over 10 years experience helping companies automate, transform and build highly-secure and stable systems. Click over to RestonLogic dot com to book a strategy session today.

Disclaimer: The blurbs highlighted on "Formula Cloud" are available for information purposes only, and don't necessarily reflect opinions of our editors.